What is that, you ask? Well, that’s the list of the top seven single-season strikeout performances in modern minor league history (since 1920). It’s a very interesting little list, don’t you think?

I compiled it a few weeks ago, as the first step in putting together what I had imagined to be an article focusing on the greatest statistical achievements by minor league players. But as soon as I had put this list together, I took a look at it and said to myself, woah, wait a minute—what’s up with this?

Two things struck me:

1) Of the top seven strikeout seasons by pitchers in minor league history, six occurred between the years of 1946 and 1952, and the other one was just a few years earlier.

2) And check out the workloads of these very young pitchers! These are innings pitched and pitch count totals that are beyond inconceivable today, for any pitcher, major league or minor league, at any age.

It suggested that while the article on the most extreme minor league statistical achievements remains a fun idea—and one I hope to pursue at some point—a more interesting exploration would be a combination of two things: first, just what the norm was of top workhorse minor league pitchers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and second, how that norm has been modified in the years since.

So what’s presented here is the first in what will be a long (slow!) series of articles, recurring periodically, exploring the top-end usage patterns of pitchers in the minor leagues. Over time, we’ll see how it changed and discuss why, as well as the wisdom,—or lack of it—of those changes.

So this is the first chapter of what will be an extensive series. This time, it’s the five-year period of 1946 through 1950.

The Top 10 Innings Leaders

I recorded the top 10 pitchers in innings pitched in each minor league classification each season. Averaging the stat lines of each of those top 10 innings-workload achievers, this is what we get:

The far right column applies Tangotiger’s Basic Pitch Count Estimator (3.3*PA + 1.5*SO + 2.2*BB), where (PA = 3*IP + H + BB) to each stat line. To put this into perspective (as we examined here), since about 1990 the very top end of workloads for major league ace pitchers has been in the 4,000 to 4,200 pitch range. And in the modern era, it is completely unheard of for a minor league pitcher at any level to come close to such a workload.

But in the 1946-50 period, it was obviously routine for pitchers to reach and far exceed it. Bear in mind that these figures represent the averages of the top 10 pitchers at each level; the highest individual workloads (which we’ll see below) were significantly greater than that.

One of the things we’ll examine as we move forward in history (in the installments to come) is precisely when the change toward the modern workload pattern began, and how smoothly (or not) it progressed. Interestingly, the 1946-50 period doesn’t even indicate the beginning of a downward shift; at every level, the workloads of top pitchers were very stable, and if anything, inching upward.

It’s extremely important to understand just what the minor leagues were, and were not, in this era. Certainly, one of the essential purposes of the minor leagues was to develop talented young prospects for major league teams. Every major league team had at least some form of a minor league “system” in place by 1946, and a few teams—the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Cardinals in particular—had vast minor league organizations, far more extensive than those operated by any team today.

But even in those farm systems, developing young talent was not the only purpose, and not necessarily the primary purpose, of a minor league team. Making money was at least as important as developing talent, and the best way to go about making money was by winning games. Minor league baseball was a fiercely competitive enterprise on the field, because win-loss performance was a critical factor in the team’s bottom-line performance.

And, of course, in 1946-50, most minor league teams weren’t major league farm clubs. They were independent. Many employed some players contracted to major league organizations (on essentially a subcontracting basis), but many teams and entire leagues were completely unaffiliated with the majors. Virtually all minor league teams placed every bit the priority on winning games that major league teams do today.

Pitching to Win

Thus, while many players employed in the minor leagues were kids in their late teens or early 20s, “prospects” with the possibility of major league careers ahead of them, many more were not. Many more were career minor leaguers, or former major leaguers continuing to play, often for many, many years, at the minor league level. Minor leaguers in 1946-50 were likely younger than their major league counterparts, but the age difference is even greater today. A high proportion of minor league players in those days—indeed, typically the best players in any league, especially at the lowest classifications—were in their late 20s or early 30s and occasionally in their late 30s or early 40s.

The minor leagues in this period were a vast enterprise, the most extensive they would ever be. (They would soon shrink disastrously, as we’ll see in future installments.) In 1947, for example, there were two major leagues comprising 16 teams; meanwhile there were 52 minor leagues, comprising more teams than I care to count—somewhere between 300 and 400. The Sporting News Baseball Guide covering that year (Baseball Guides are my primary source for all of this data) handles the major leagues in pages 1 through 216, and then the stats for the minor leagues (stats which are, of course, not nearly as detailed and comprehensive as those of the majors) consume pages 217 through 564. (I don’t seek your sympathy here, as I assure you things like this are a labor of love, but it’s worth comprehending just what an ambitious task it has been to search and compile this data—there were a lot of minor leagues in those years!)

In such a minor league world, developing young talent was attended to, of course. Not only the fully affiliated or outright-owned major league farm clubs had such an interest; one of the major sources of ongoing revenue for independent minor league teams was the sale of home-grown stars to higher classifications. The San Francisco Seals’ sale of Joe DiMaggio to the New York Yankees in 1934 (for a mountain of cash, plus several players, plus the one-year-delayed delivery of DiMaggio) is a very prominent example of a standard business procedure of independent minor league teams until well into the 1950s. Thus “shredding the arm” of a young pitcher through overuse was in the interest of no one (though teams may well have had little reason to be concerned for a pitcher’s productivity several years down the road).

But minor league teams were primarily focused on winning games, and their use of pitchers reflected that. Young pitchers weren’t handled nearly as carefully as they would be in later years, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that the use of young pitchers in workloads such as these was anything but foolhardy in the context of preparing them for future major league careers.

The Very Top Workhorses: 1946-1950

All right, in closing for this time, let’s examine the heaviest workloads among minor league pitchers in this period. As suggested by the Pitch Count Estimator, here are all the minor leaguers from 1946 through 1950 who threw 4,900 or more pitches in a season:

By way of perspective, the Pitch Count Estimator indicates that no major league pitcher has come close to throwing 4,900 pitches in a season since Phil Niekro in 1979. The 5,500-pitch level of Albrecht and Upton has been reached in modern times only in the most heavily worked seasons of Niekro, Nolan Ryan, Wilbur Wood and Mickey Lolich.

The only major leaguer in 1946-50 who managed it was Bob Feller in 1946. No other major league pitcher in those years reached 5,000 pitches in a season.

I don’t know how old most of these pitchers were, because most never appeared in the majors, and so I have no resource at my disposal that includes their birth year. A few of those whose ages we do know were young, but not all. It is worth noting that none of these pitchers—the most heavily worked in the entire minor leagues over a five-year period—achieved significant success in the major leagues, if they made it to the majors at all.

In a few weeks, we’ll see how these performances compare with those of the minor league workhorses of 1951-1955.